As of this minute (literally), “About Last Night” is being read in fourteen time zones.
That is just plain cool. Hello, Greenland! Hello, Brazil! Hello, world!
Archives for January 25, 2004
TT: The continuing saga of Sunday
Now showing on my magic cable box, Garden of Evil (Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, directed by Henry Hathaway, score by Bernard Herrmann) and Beat the Devil (Bogart, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Jennifer Jones, written by Truman Capote, directed by John Huston). I flip from one to the other every three or four minutes, which is easy to do with a digital video recorder. By now, the two movies are pretty thoroughly scrambled up in my head. That’s quite a cinematic frittata.
I still haven’t done any of the stuff I hadn’t done as of three o’clock this afternoon (see my earlier posting). It is now eight-fifteen. Boy, does it ever feel good to blow a whole day. I feel like I’ve cheated the world, or at least a bunch of editors.
Do other semi-recovering workaholics take whole days off? Or did I just discover a radical new idea?
TT: But not for thee
Says Nat Hentoff:
A bitter, months-long dispute within the American Library Association — the largest nation-based organization of librarians in the world — continues as to whether to demand that Fidel Castro release 10 imprisoned independent librarians found guilty of making available to Cubans copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.
Along with 65 other Cuban dissenters, the ”subversive” librarians were sentenced to 20 or more years in Castro’s gulag. Some urgently need medical attention, which they’re not receiving.
At the ALA’s annual midwinter meeting this month in San Diego, Karen Schneider, a member of the ALA’s governing council, wanted to amend a final report on the meeting to call for their immediate release. In proposing her amendment, Schneider told her colleagues that Castro’s police had confiscated and burned books and other materials at the independent libraries.
The amendment was overwhelmingly defeated by the 182-member council. The report was swept through by a raising of hands.
From Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, libraries across this country will invite their communities to the annual Banned Books Week, decrying censorship. I’ve spoken, by invitation, during those weeks at libraries around the country. Will any library invite me this year to talk about the burning of library books in Cuba?…
If you haven’t been following this story, read the whole thing here. It’s not pretty.
TT: Things I haven’t done today (as of 3 p.m.)
(1) Shave.
(2) Shower.
(3) Open the front door of my apartment.
(4) Say a single word out loud.
(5) Read a newspaper, on or off line.
(6) Listen to any music (other than that heard on the soundtracks of movies).
(7) Write or edit anything for money.
(8) Spend money.
(9) Answer the telephone (it hasn’t rung, though).
(10) Answer any e-mail.
TT: Emptying the mailbag
Here are some of the many interesting pieces of e-mail I’ve received in recent weeks:
of modernist impact on the little heartland town? Maybe there is
something purposeful in the lack of appreciation for most of the high
art of the twentieth century. Modernism has little to say to the folks
who, like me, choose to live in the great dead heart of America. We
are not politically or artistically correct. You came (apparently) from small-town roots and were always drawn to
high culture. Nothing wrong with that but it is not the only world.
You went to NY and are our representative to that town I refer to as
“east of the Hudson.” Your sensibilities are more complex than most of
the folks whose voices are important on that $24-dollar hunk of rock.
But there are only a few of us out here who care much at all about what
is current in NYC. Manhattan is very, very inbred, by our standards
and while we read the NYT and the WSJ, both of which are now delivered
every morning to our mailboxes. But our daily lives are not very much
impacted.
screen but are still bigger than a filmstrip screen in a classroom. It
was part of the Student Union’s film series (which was shown in
University Hall — logic? at my university? riiiiight). Most of the time
they showed current or near-current films (Wayne’s World, The Freshman)
but one quarter they did old movies. I loved Casablanca deeply. After years of oppressive jokes by the Baby
Boomers about films I’d never seen but was still supposed to worship, I
honestly was sure it must suck. Instead it felt so fresh and nasty and
cynical and romantic that it might have been written just yesterday,
for me. I bought my mom the DVD for Christmas, but really, I wanted it for
myself. (But I gave myself Firefly and a great deal of anime, so don’t
feel too sorry….) I do plan to convert my cousins. Soon.
as a part of its campus film series. (It screened on Valentine’s Day,
appropriately enough, and caused great distress among my group of
girlfriends, as we had neither Ricks nor Victors in our lives that year.)
The film program typically showed more recent films, but periodically it
would screen classics, and those screenings were a wonderful opportunity to
see these films the way they were meant to be seen.
his subject what one sees from the window of an airplane.” And I refer you to this.
regional orchestras. I live in Portland, OR, home of the Oregon
Symphony, one of the orchestras mentioned in your piece. Portland is
also home to the Portland Art Museum, a passable regional museum with a
decent permanent collection and plenty of traveling shows. I think that the experience of seeing classical music performed live is
quite different than that of listening to a CD. I can buy books with
many great paintings from Amazon.com as well, but is that the same as
seeing the original? I can watch ballet on TV– same thing.
Experiencing even a mediocre performance of an old standard is
something that still captures me, but maybe that’s my small town roots.
The symphony also gives us rubes the opportunity to see a variety of
soloists we would not otherwise see, many world-class. In New York, you have an abundance of culture. Portland is really not
bad given it’s size, but losing the symphony would be a blow.
Furthermore, there is considerable synergy between various arts
organizations. For instance, the principal percussionist for the Oregon
Symphony is also the music director for the Portland Opera (or is it
the ballet? I forget, but you get the point).
Lew Archer novels; it puzzles me why you don’t share that enthusiasm (as I
recall from your review of a Ross MacDonald biography a couple of years
back). Like the Archer stories, TWILIGHT transmutes the smartass patter of
Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade into a more realistic look at an aging
outsider. And also like them, TWILIGHT’s murderer, when uncovered, seems
sadly inevitable, a convincing portrait of tragic choices made – rather than
the Sidney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre monsters of more black-and-white private
eye adventures (not that I don’t also love THE MALTESE FALCON, understand,
but this is more interestingly complex in some ways).
up on TV” but they actually have aired on Turner Classic Movies and fairly
frequently over the past couple of years. I’m a freelance
writer/researcher for TCM (in fact I wrote the Boetticher obit on the
website, along with a bunch of other stuff such as DVD reviews) and have
done work on these. I think TCM may have even shown the entire cycle but
could be wrong about that because I don’t remember Decision at Sundown, a
particular favorite because it’s so disillusioned (even ending with a
cowboy riding off into the sunset though in probably the least heroic
manner imaginable).
if you lowered your standards a bit. Take a look at this.
data point about the issue of subway noise. I just saw a classical concert
there (Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Messaien’s Vingt Regards; fantastic
performance, incidentally). I found the subway to be audible, but not
particularly obtrusive, especially because as the concert went on and I got
used to it going by. I should mention that this was only during relatively
quiet sections; during louder passages (of which there were quite a few),
the subway noise was pretty much masked by the music.
Steal at will! And thanks to you all for writing.
TT: Still plumb tuckered
I’d planned on writing today, and maybe even going out to see a movie, but the truth is that I’m worn to the nubbin. I wrote too much and did too much this past week, and it’s too cold outside this afternoon. I think maybe what I need to do is stay indoors and look at my new Arnold Friedman lithograph and catch up with some of the movies stored on my magic cable box.
Last night I watched Kings Row. The movie itself is more or less preposterous, a whole field full of stale corn, but I marveled at the late-romantic beauties of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold score–more Straussian than Strauss–and marveled, too, at how utterly inappropriate it is to the small-town story it purports to illustrate but in fact overwhelms. I was no less surprised to discover that Ronald Reagan was a damned good actor. The only Reagan movie I’d ever seen was Bedtime for Bonzo, not exactly a fair test of his skills, but he was definitely up to the challenge of the demanding part he played in Kings Row. (In case you’ve forgotten, it’s the one where he wakes up, sees that his legs have been amputated, and shrieks “Where’s the rest of me?”) Just to confirm my first impressions, I looked up Otis Ferguson’s 1941 New Republic review of the film, and found that it refers in passing to “Ronald Reagan, who is good and no surprise.” Obviously Ferguson, the best American film critic of his generation, took Reagan’s gifts for granted–surely the finest kind of tribute.
Today, in an odd parallel, I’ve been watching Will Penny, a Seventies western with a slightly off-key score by David Raksin (he wrote “Laura”), lovely to hear but not quite right for the Old West in winter, and a first-rate performance by Charlton Heston, another gifted actor whose reputation has gotten lost in the political shuffle. Whatever you happen to think of gun control, he sure could act–in the right roles, anyway–and he’s excellent here as an aging cowboy whose best years have slipped away from him. Heston actually made quite a few interesting small-scale films in between Ben-Hur and the big-bucks disaster movies with which he occupied himself in the waning years of his stardom. Will Penny is one of the best of them, not at all the sort of vehicle you’d expect from a name-above-the-title Hollywood star, and decidedly worth seeing on a cold Sunday afternoon.
What do you know? I actually wrote something! But that’s enough for now: I’ve got a lot of work to do this week, and I think it might be smart for me to lay fallow for the rest of the day. I may tinker with the Top Fives, and I might even post a bit of reader mail if I start to feel restless, but otherwise I’ll stick to sitting on the couch, chewing through some of the other old movies my digital video recorder has stored up for me. Have a nice day.
TT: Almanac
“I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.
“There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.
“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?”
M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me